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His Bark Is Worse Than His Bite

By

Lance Esplund

Updated May 29, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion?

The Drawing Center

35 Wooster St., (212) 219-2166

Through July 23

Ever since Manet slapped viewers' faces with "Olympia" (1863), which turned the odalisque into a whore, artists have probably wondered if their works have enough punch to avoid becoming wallflowers. This has never been an issue for the Chicago-born painter Leon Golub (1922-2004), who created large, political paintings addressing violence, sex, death and racial oppression, and often featuring hand-scrawled text. Although Mr. Golub came of age during the height of Abstract Expressionism, he embraced the human figure as a brutal, sexual and power-driven animal. Humanity, for Mr. Golub, is a mask worn by savage, snarling beasts that happen to walk upright.

Forty-three of Mr. Golub's oil-stick drawings from 1999-2004—one mural-size, the rest about 8 by 10 inches—constitute an elegantly installed traveling show organized by Brett Littman at the Drawing Center. Mr. Littman has floated the pictures in plain white frames and painted the gallery burnt orange. The setting emphasizes the fiery tooth of Mr. Golub's washy, erotic and violent pictures of lions, nudes, dogs, bound slaves and satyrs, but also mellows the works' charged atmosphere.

Mr. Golub's art is infamous for its crude, full-frontal attack of image and text (most of which can neither be reproduced nor quoted in a family newspaper). Here, his intimate scale, fluid blood reds and cool blues initially offset the ferociousness of his subjects. In "Scratch," of a dog chewing its hide, the picture's title, written with a razor-edged red line, rises above fecal-brown smudges and bleeds to the surface. In "Live & Die Like a Lion?," "Aging Golden Sphinx" and "Alarmed Dog Encountering Pink!," raw text, image and color, both muddy and bright, keep the drawings teetering among emotional outburst, cryptic message and talisman. Yet there is an offhandedness and ingrained antiaesthetic bent to Mr. Golub's approach, as if he is concerned more with his convoluted messages than with making a self-sustaining work of art. (Many of the drawings here, devolving into the politically trite and sexually juvenile, resemble adolescent doodles.) They sting, bite and punch. Unfortunately, ugliness and awkwardness—as if all things untoward are best presented in an untoward fashion—keep most of these works from rising above assault into art.

Mark di Suvero

Paula Cooper Gallery

534 W. 21st St., (212) 255-1105

Through July 30

Mark di Suvero's monumental sculptures need room to breathe. They have looked best among the rolling hills of the Hudson Valley's Storm King Art Center. There, his abstract works—made of wood, I-beams, wire, chains and twisted, rusted, painted, cut and stainless steel—interact with landscape and sky. In the city, dwarfed by skyscrapers, they can tend to echo the industrial setting, feeling closer to accessories than works of art.

But if Mr. di Suvero's work must be seen in Manhattan, the swank, skylighted, cathedralesque space of the Paula Cooper Gallery is as good as it gets. Not too big and not too small, its rough-hewn-chic environment is a fitting context for Mr. di Suvero's industrial-organic contraptions. There, the 24-foot-high "Nova Albion" (1964-65), made of logs and steel, is the centerpiece in a show consisting of four sculptures (one as recent as 2006) and a large abstract painting. The canvas is merely decorative.

The three smaller sculptures, variations on totems, are playful and quirky. The taut, triangular "Nova Albion," like some medieval catapult or outsize crossbow, is the star attraction. Constrained, threatening, tightly wound, it looks on the verge of lift-off.

Albert York's 'Two Men on a Moonlit Road,' at the Davis & Langdale Gallery.
Davis & Langdale Company

Albert York: A Memorial Exhibition

Davis & Langdale

231 E. 60th St., (212) 838-0333

Through June 18

The American painter Albert York, who died in October at age 80, is an artist admirers like to keep to themselves. Those of us who love his unassuming, generally off-square 10-inch works—of landscapes, figures, trees, cows, dogs and vases of flowers—don't want crowds blocking our view of the mysterious pictures he himself referred to as depicting "paradise . . . the Garden of Eden."

But it's past time for Mr. York to get the attention he deserves. A memorial exhibition of more than 30 paintings at Davis & Langdale (the sole venue for York's strange, humble little pictures since 1963) really should be bigger and elsewhere—a museum, perhaps. For now it will have to do.

The show includes beautiful paintings of Henri Rousseau-like trees; wrestling dogs; cows in the countryside (reminiscent of Constable); tiny Courbet-like portraits; reclining nudes; a personification of Spring; and bouquets in glass jars that rival Manet's late flower paintings. But also on view are pictures of skeletons lounging in the shade, conversing with or escorting nudes; as well as the artist's repeated theme of snakes in the grass—works that illuminate the darker side of Mr. York's peculiar little patch of paradise.